Why, of course it does. I'm not going to let you take the whole blame. I could n't come forward yesterday, it was all so sudden. The scandal would have rotted my election altogether. But you shall be cleared—at any rate in the eyes of this household. I came down with the intention of telling Norma, but she has bolted to Cornwall. Upset, I suppose. However, as soon as she comes back—”
“Let things be as they are,” interrupted Jimmie, closing his eyes for a moment wearily, for he had been suffering much bodily pain. “When I said I was David Rendell, I meant it. I can go on acting the part. It's pretty easy.”
“Impossible, my dear old chap,” said Morland, with an air of heartiness. “You went into the affair with your eyes shut. You didn't know it was such a horrible mess.”
“All the more reason for Norma to remain ignorant. It was for her sake as well as yours.”
A peculiar tenderness in Jimmie's tone caused Morland, not usually perceptive, to look at him sharply.
“You are very keen upon Norma,” he remarked.
Jimmie closed his eyes again, and smiled. He was very weak and tired. The pain of his wound and a certain mental agitation had kept him awake all night, and just before Morland entered he had been dropping off to sleep for the first time. An unconquerable drowsiness induced irresponsibility of speech.
“'The desire of the moth for the star,'” he murmured.
Morland slid from the bed to his feet, and with his hands in his pockets gazed in astonishment at his friend.
An entirely novel state of affairs dawned upon him which required a few moments to bring into focus. The ghastly tragedy for which he was responsible, presenting itself luridly at every instant of the night and day, had hidden from his reminiscent vision Norma's rush down the slope. and her scared tending of the unconscious man. Jimmie's words brought back the scene with unpleasant vividness and provided the interpretation. When he saw this clearly, he was the most amazed man in the three kingdoms. That Jimmie should have conceived and nourished a silly, romantic passion for Norma, although he had never interested himself sufficiently in Jimmie's private affairs to suspect it, was humorously comprehensible. Ludicrously incomprehensible, however, was a reciprocation of the sentiment on the part of Norma. In spite of remorse, in spite of anxiety, in spite of the struggle between cowardice and manhood, his uppermost sensation at that moment was one of lacerated vanity. He had been hoodwinked, befooled, deceived. His own familiar friend had betrayed him; the woman he was about to honour with his name had set him at naught. He tingled with anger and sense of wrong.